Made in Britain

A fatal failure to identify with this nation or the country of their parents turns young Muslims to Islamic extremism, writes Aatish Taseer

It is not hard to imagine what the Leeds suburb of Beeston was like before it became known that three of London’s Tube bombers worked or lived there. For someone like me — a Punjabi with parents from each side of the India-Pakistan border — the streets here reveal a pre-partition mixture of Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs.

Men in shalwar kurta (traditional dress from the subcontinent) stand on street corners chatting as if in a bazaar in Lahore. They oppose Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war, they “hate” America, they might even think the West has united in a fight against Muslims; but these are not the faces of extremism. Their involvement in 7/7 is a generational one: they have raised the young men who are the genus most susceptible to Islamic extremism in this country — the second- generation British Pakistanis.